Cemeteries

Note: any church within an urban environment may have had its
graveyard closed after the Burial Act of 1853. Any new church built
after that is unlikely to have had a graveyard at all.

Church History

This Place of Worship was founded in 1846, but we understand it was closed in 1939.

Old Maps of 1881 show the area now occupied by the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, and St Ursula's School (now E-ACT Academy), as the site of "The Monastery". By 1903, it has become the Convent of Mercy, which has its own Chapel, and a small graveyard adjacent to, and on the south-west side of the Chapel.

The Monastery was evidently a misnomer for a Convent, which was built for the Visitation Order, a community of nuns founded at Annecy in Savoy in 1610 which had been introduced to England in 1804. A house named "Westmead" was purchased from Mr. Irving, a Methodist minister in 1831, and according to an article published in The Catholic Heald of 4th October 1946, four nuns arrived "at this date 100 years ago" from Bermondsey "to begin the work for which they are now so well
known". The choir, chapel and cloisters were the first buildings to be erected.

The return to the Religious Census of 1851 (HO 129/330/5/1/6) may well apply to the chapel, though it is not named as such. "There is not any place of public Religious Worship in the place in which I reside - but there is a private chapel belonging to the house used by the inmates who are a Society of Ladies living in Community to whom I am Chaplain", signed by L. Maes, B.D.

At a later date, presumably, the chapel was made available to the local Catholic community to attend mass.

The first school was opened in 1868, in a converted stable and coach house, the teachers being provided by the Sisters of St Joseph of Annecy. When the Sisters of Mercy took over the convent and school in 1896, it was renamed St Ursula's.

By the 1930s, a new church was needed to relieve overcrowding, and "the Reverend Mother at the time gave the diocese a plot of land for a church and presbytery". The building was completed in 1939 and blessed by Bishop Lee on 13 September.

www.magic.gov.uk (Modern Maps with various overlays)
Zoom out to 1:100000 to see County boundaries, and 1:500000 to show Parish Boundaries.

Reference

Places recorded by the Registrar
General under the provisions of the Places of Worship
Registration Act 1855 (2010) is available as a
"Freedom of Information" document from the website
What Do They Know.

You can specify either a Place, or OS Grid Reference to
search for. When you specify a Place, only entries for that place
will be returned, with Places of Worship listed in alphabetical
order. If you specify a Grid Reference, Places of Worship in the
immediate vicinity will be listed, in order of distance from the Grid
Reference supplied. The default is to list 10, but you can specify
How Many you want to see, up to a maximum of 100.

You can further refine your search by supplying other search terms.

You can specify entries with ('Yes') or without ('No') photographs.

You can specify a church or chapel's Dedication, to restrict entries to
those containing the term you supply as a dedication. So for instance, 'John'
would return 'St John', 'St Mary and St John', 'St John the Divine' &c.

You can specify a Street address, and likewise 'George' will return
George Place, St George's Street, George and Dragon, &c.

You can restrict the search to classes of Denomination. The exact denomination
is always shown in the results, although the search is for broad types. So you
can search for 'Methodist', but not 'Wesleyan Methodist' or 'Primitive Methodist'.
'Multi-denominational' includes Ecumenical Partnerships, and
'Other' means anything not covered by other broad classes.

Please note the above provides a search of selected fields in
the Gloucestershire section of the Places of Worship
Database on this site (churchdb.gukutils.org.uk) only.
For other counties, or for a full search of the Database, you might
like to try the site's
Google Custom Search, which includes full webpage content.

Further Information

This site provides historical information about churches, other places
of worship and cemeteries. It has no affiliation with the churches or
congregations themselves, nor is it intended to provide a means to find
places of worship in the present day.